Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 1, 1990 TAG: 9005010157
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH MYDANS THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
David Jacobsen felt angry at his captors, at the press, at the world.
Lawrence Martin Jenco just wanted to look out the window, hungry to see the earth and the sky and the trees.
For these three former hostages, the release of Robert Polhill last week and Frank Reed Monday in Beirut brings memories of their own first moments of freedom and just what freedom meant to them after months of captivity.
In each case, the emphasis was slightly different, as was the way the men seemed to absorb their experiences into their lives.
But they agreed in interviews conducted last weekend before Reed was freed that a man regains his freedom in the small details of life, in the ability to walk about or to choose when and what to eat.
"Little things came to mind as I watched Mr. Polhill on television," said Jenco, 56, a Roman Catholic priest who works as a campus minister at the University of Southern California.
"I've been through that process. I know where he is now."
All three former captives said Polhill, who was an accounting professor at Beirut University, must now be going through a bewildering time, as a man who has lived in isolation is suddenly surrounded by clamor.
"I was surprised that people had paid much attention to the fact that I was taken hostage," said Weir, 65, a Presbyterian minister who now teaches at the San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, Calif.
"I thought it had been unnoticed."
Jacobsen, who was released Nov. 2, 1986, at the age of 55, and who was the last hostage to be freed until Polhill's release, said:
"Basically you want to be left alone with your loved ones. It's tiring to have the phone ring constantly, not to be able to step out the front door without a camera crew waiting."
"You become a hostage again," said Jacobsen, who spent nearly 18 months in captivity. "It's not right and it's not fair."
During his 19 months of captivity, which ended on July 26, 1986, Jenco said, "my dream was that I was going to be set free and just go home to Joliet and knock on the back door and say, `I'm home now.' "
"I was a little bit upset that my dream was not being realized," he said.
As he watched Polhill being interviewed inside an automobile just after his release, Jenco said, "I thought: What a tragedy. Why not allow the man to look out the window and see the creation he had not seen for 36 months?"
Recalling his own experience, he said:
"I remember once in one of my prisons, a guard left a door open and I looked outside and I saw a tree, and I just started to cry."
As with this sense of deprivation, the new sense of abundance after his release made itself felt in the overpowering presence of the details of normal life.
Jenco felt paralyzed by the variety of food that was suddenly avaialable to him.
"You see the massed foods in front of you and you don't know where to begin," he said. "You don't even feel hungry."
At a reception soon after his release, Jenco said, he had to apologize to an ambassador's wife, saying:
"I'm sorry I'm staring at you. I haven't seen a woman in 19 months."
In the years since, he said, he has worked to maintain what he called "a certain patience," a sense of proportion about life that allows him to stand in a long line or miss an airplane more calmly than in the past.
Weir's first moments of freedom on Sept. 14, 1985, after 16 months in captivity, were lonely and frightening as his captors left him standing on a darkened street in Beirut.
Soon, he said, the clamor of his reception would overtake him and he would feel "joy and a sense of elation and great liberation."
But at the time of his release, he said:
"I also felt very awkward. I was in sandals and an old jump suit. I had a beard. I felt kind of out of place. I was a stranger at that moment; at least, I felt I was a stranger."
In an unsettling way, that moment of liberation echoed the moment of his captivity.
"When I was captured, everything in a short space of time was taken away: family, friends, work, possessions, opportunities to engage in some kind of creative activity with other people - all that was stripped away and at that moment I felt very vulnerable," he said.
"And in the return I felt vulnerable as well."
Weir said this sense of deprivation and vulnerability has stayed with him as a feeling of empathy with the unfortunate people of the world.
"I feel very keenly that I had joined those oppressed by the world, people who are locked into circumstances of many different kinds and who don't find a way out and who don't find a voice," he said.
In talking about the former hostages, John Stein, deputy director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance, noted that Polhill had said anger and humor were the emotions that helped him endure his captivity.
"I think one of the reasons David Jacobsen has done so well is that he is a very angry man," Stein said.
"He was a tough, angry man when he entered into that situation and his anger stayed good and high while he was a captive. And it has served him well in many respects since then."
Jacobsen, who now lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., was director of the American University Hospital in Beirut at the time of his kidnapping.
One of the things that made him angry when he was released, and continues to make him angry today, is the voraciousness of the press.
"I get asked the same questions over and over," he said.
During his captivity, Jacobsen said, Terry Anderson, The Associated Press correspondent who is in his sixth year as a hostage, warned him that this would happen.
"He called it the media gang rape. That was his expression."
The isolation of captivity has bred a sense of brotherhood among people who have been taken hostage.
Years after their release, all three men said they could never feel truly free so long as other men remain captive.
"You are still held hostage," Jenco said. "I will always be there. You wake up, and maybe today they're going to be free."
by CNB